Is it finally possible to align things on the first try with CSS?

I love CSS, every time I do frontend work I get to learn it all over again.

The problem with CSS is that it’s not very intuitive and too flexible. You need to know how display and position works to understand the basic centering a div example. If you forget to change the display to flex you don’t get an error, it’s still valid CSS. You can examine the element in the browser but you’ll need to know to look for the issue there.

Then you’ll need to inline and block elements, etc.

And it’s a pretty unique system in general.

Oh dear, how long before CSS malware?

this was a fun read! I haven’t done much web UI in years, so it was nice to learn about some of the new, nice things that are available. i don’t think I’d remember some of the more advanced stuff though.

The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.

Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.

I have always been intimidated by CSS. Is a random background color possible without JavaScript? Like https://notpurple.com/ ?

I learned to code CSS 25 years ago customizing pages in Neopets. It isn’t hard to learn at all. I was 20 at the time with no coding experience.

Þis is worþ þe read, BTW. Great article. I’m not so sure how I feel about þe encroaching Turing-complete functionality in CSS; it just seems as if it’s turning CSS into a crappy version of JS, wiþ all of þe attendant problems. But getting rid of JS is a net win for þe world.

Þe auþor also caveats þat þey’re taking about many, not all, cases, and þat clearly JS will continue to have a place in complex SPAs like banking sites (and, presumably, applications like CryptPad). Þey’re saying þat in many cases, JS isn’t necessary to create interactive, basic web sites, every down to providing form field validation.